


I'll bear all this echoing

by orphan_account



Series: AU: all those gears and arteries [3]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen, Nothing graphic or violent but the intent is there nonetheless, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-06
Updated: 2016-03-06
Packaged: 2018-05-25 02:08:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6176122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Apparently, Helena doesn’t breathe when she's concentrating. Her chest stood still as she stared out the window, listening, and it made her look like a doll. Looking like this, the only thing about her that seemed truly alive was the broken melody of her machinery. The sibilance of her cold black blood, the hollow reverberation of her veins, the crushing twisting love that split itself in half beneath all that insulation.</p><p>*Android AU*</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll bear all this echoing

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Florence and the Machine's Queen of Peace

 

Music pulsed from the stereo in a broken melody. A trumpet soared across an invisible page of notes, accompanied by cascading piano notes. Sarah smiled a little.

“This song played non-stop when I was a kid. I was more of a head banger myself but I remember bringing it home nestled in Siobhan’s old tape recorder  This girl—Lily—had handed me the tape and that was it. She just said, ‘ _here_ ,’ and passed it over. The songs all bled into each other, tangled by the same old chords played in different keys, but I listened all the way through.”

She smiled to herself and glanced off the road. Helena was staring at her. Clouds reflected in her eyes. She was reminded of the pool of ice she’d found at the back of Siobhan’s house—the way clouds glanced off it as trapped fog beneath the surface.

“Siobhan, she said nothing. Her hands were always busy with something, scratching sauce off dishes, sweeping food scraps, and digging holes for things—plants mostly, sometimes mice she’d caught the night before. Callused palms, white knuckles. Dangerous hands.

"Anyway, she was making dinner when I got home. Haggis, probably. Never looked at me. Next morning, those hands brought in a stereo and that song was the only thing on it.”

The song had ended some minutes before. A dark wrinkle lay in the space between Helena’s eyebrows like she was imagining what it might’ve sounded like. It was difficult to know how much Helena was processing. She didn’t speak again for a couple minutes and kept her eyes trained on the road.

“Next day, I trashed it. It was someone else's shite mixtape, I was the idiot who took it.  _Better than throwing it out_ , she’d said. All flashed teeth, red gums, chiming laughter—she couldn’t pick my face out from a crowd. I took it between my hands that day and pressed so hard the plastic dug into my palms before it broke in two. Siobhan forced me to hear that song nearly every day till I left. And I only tolerated it cause I thought she liked it. But it was the other way around…”

Apparently, Helena didn't breathe when she was concentrating. Her chest stood still as she stared out the window, listening, and it made her look like a doll. The only life in her was that broken melody of her machinery: The sibilance of her black blood, the hollow reverberation of her veins, the crushing twisting love that split itself in half beneath all that insulation.

“…She hated that damn song just as much as I did and we both sat there playing it like fools, hating each other for it, trying to make the other happy.”

There was nothing left for her to say. She remembered walking downstairs, trailing a hand down the banister, and finding that song filling the kitchen like light. _Why, Mum? Why did you try so hard with that song? I came home every day with scraps of things I wanted to share with you, why that_?

The minutes held a bated breath in the silence between them. Finally, Helena broke out from her stare and faced Sarah.

“It gives you bad memories. I'm sorry I let it play," said Helena. She patted her cheek lightly with the edge of her fingers, then again—harder.

“Helena—no, I was just reminiscing,” Sarah said and forced her eyes to the road. Helena repeated the word softly under her breath, ‘ _rem-in-is-cing_ ’ so Sarah tried for a better word, “Remembering, Helena.”

“Remembering,” Helena echoed. Her voice trailed off vaguely but a note of feeling lingered afterward, like the ionic taste of excitement after a lighting storm. Here, the feeling condensed against the window pane and obscured the darkening sky above. Raindrops spattered against the glass with the same tinkering melody the piano had made before.

“Do you remember any songs from your childhood?” Sarah pressed.

She might have said something along the lines of—the tick of the scientist’s watch resembled the setting of bones as he sat there, slicing through brain matter and code; the difference between remembering and forgetting was decided in a matter of keystrokes. The voice of a stranger never felt so familiar: _Hey, it’s me. You know what to do_. Sometimes she heard a low drone in the hollow of her ear, like a hovering wasp, but couldn’t place the sound. It reminded her of those words strung together by sinew, _Bye-Bye Sarah_. Heretic words.

Helena patted her cheek lightly. Then harder—

“ _Helena_ —Answer me. Please.”

Something clicked under the weight of her voice and Helena wove her hands together. Her spine straightened and words tumbled from her mouth half-finished.

“I think I’d like the ocean,” She said. “You said that once, I think, or—I like, also, the sound of pages turning and I think I like that song.” She waited a beat, and then relaxed into her seat, having apparently answered the question. “I’d like to know the name.”

Sarah readjusted her hands on the wheel. Her palms left impressions on the leather, ‘ _like little angels’_ , her daughter would say.

 “Honestly, I don’t remember. Scrubbed a lot from my mind after I left.”

Childhood memories were something she’d bundled in her pack and brought with her as an afterthought, but between the train stops and the travelers, she hadn’t found much room for them and had traded them for a more encapsulated escape. The few she’d kept had been tainted by her marks, smothered beneath wet sheets, or otherwise shoved into unzipped pants.  

“The cloud?”

Sarah squinted against the glare of the clouds, as though trying to decide which one Helena had meant. Rain was falling against the windshield and being cleared away by the two sweeping black wipers. She imagined Helena's mind as a pair of windshield wipers, gliding along the glass in long movements, separating the sheath of water from the tons of iron and steel.

“No, Helena—Siobhan’s house, remember? Ran away at fourteen, fifteen and came back ‘round twenty.”

She tried calculating how long it’d been since she last saw Siobhan, or her daughter. It'd been on-and-off for a couple years. Her knuckles looked bone white against the glare. 

“Siobhan,” Helena repeated, and said nothing more.

“Don’t think about her too much,” Sarah said, glancing over at Helena’s frowning expression again.

“She killed mice,” Helena continued in the same innocent tone.

“I’ve killed more than mice.”

Helena hummed, sucked her lips between her teeth.

“Who was a better servant: Job or Abraham?”

“Didn’t know either of them,” Sarah said. "Why?"

Helena’s fingernails were rimmed with black and her palms had crescents from where her nails had pressed. It shocked her how much they reminded her of Siobhan’s hands after returning from the garden. When Helena spoke again, her voice held a low reproachful tone, like a teacher attempting to soothe the excitable voices of her audience.

“Job lost his entire family. He questioned you, nearly condemned you, but in the end saw the light and was good; Abraham obeyed like a dog and you saved his son, but many generations would betray you after."

"Helena, we'll talk about that later."

"But then, Abraham never doubted you even as he picked up the stone to kill his son. Job only liked you because you made his life comfortable. He never would've killed for you." 

"Why are you telling me this?"

Helean's hand unwound from her lap and covered Sarah's. Briefly, she imagined that hand tightening in a steel vise and tugging violently. At this speed, the car would hydroplane and screech before probably swerving into the bank. In Helena's vulpine smile she saw both their bodies being pulled from the wreckage a beautiful tangled amalgamation of flesh and steel.

"Siobhan doesn't see you like--," 

“You’ll not harm Siobhan. _Ever_.”

A clouded look came over Helena’s eyes and her spine straightened again, as though contorted by some internal string. She worked her jaw silently and appeared almost to be choking, although her chest never heaved and her flesh remained complacently pale—it was the confusion in her eyes, that helpless look. Finally, a low drone emanated from deep within and her expression flattened.

"Understand, Helena?"

“Yes,” she said at last.

For the remainder of the ride home, neither of them spoke. Sarah watched the painted white line race beside her car’s heated rubber tires and tried to keep from crying.

Her heart pounded senselessly—torn apart at the seams by the song, the story, and everything that sprang from it. She imagined how Siobhan must have felt lifting the metal spring of the mouse trap to release the rotting meat beneath it, straining against the tension of the coils. The mouse’s body would've slid to the ground with a deep crease in its grey fur.

How must it have felt digging up that dark earth? She could imagine Siobhan’s measured hands separating the tangle of grass and roots from the swarming insects within the soil, and then molding the stiff body to fit in with the earth. But she couldn’t imagine her preparing the bait—that shapeless spot of peanut butter on the peeled apple slice; why peel the skin?

Nor could she imagine Siobhan crouching unseen, adjusting the position of the trap, making it just right.

It seemed too loaded with intent: a bit like the metal spring right before it snaps. 

 


End file.
